Jacksonville Personal Injury Blog

Big Tobacco is at it again. With 8,000 cases filed by smokers who are ill, or the survivors of smokers, the tobacco industry vows it will not quit fighting.

Lewis Specland, 82, even made an offer to settle after another smoker won a $2.2 million claim in a Palm Beach County Circuit Court on behalf of her late husband.

Specland has emphysema and is afraid after 50 years of smoking he will not live long enough to get to court. The tobacco industry did not even acknowledge his offer, reports the Palm Beach Post.

Keep the clock ticking and some plaintiffs will just fade away they figure.

If settlements were made across the board of about $150,000, the tobacco industry would be out $1.2 billion, a fraction of the $145 billion awarded in a Miami class-action case representing 8,000 smokers.

And consider what Big Tobacco is paying out in a fleet of high earning attorneys to fight plaintiffs with all they have. Keep fighting and even a favorable award can be overturned on appeal.

So far there have been 22 Florida tobacco lawsuits that have favored plaintiffs since February 2009. Big Tobacco has lost all but three and the average award was $22 million.

The Palm Beach Post reports tobacco executives have no intention of paying what the juries have awarded. There is a saving grace. Tobacco companies will have to pay attorney’s fees for the plaintiffs who do make it to trial and receive a jury award.

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Believe it or not, there is an alarmingly high number of middle and high school students who are trying smoking, using a hookah according to a recent article in the Florida Trend. Hookah smoking involves smoking flavored tobacco with a water pipe.

The cooler smoke gives the impression that the smoking is less dangerous, but research indicates hookah smoking is just as dangerous as cigarettes. The journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology, reports hookah smoking delivers up to four times the nicotine as a cigarette, 11 times the carbon monoxide, and 72 times the tar.

And forget the idea that the water is filtering out the toxins, says University of Florida’s department of health professor, Tracey Barnett.

When a hookah business wanted to open in St. Augustine, the city council discouraged it, saying they would close it down.

At the Casbah Café, smokers receive a warning on a card that explains the dangers of hookah smoking. It says this is a tobacco product and carries the same risks as smoking. But that has not deterred high school students.

Florida tobacco litigation attorneys are concerned about a 2009 Florida Youth Tobacco Survey that found that 14.2% of high school girls, and 17.3% of high school boys had used a hookah to smoke tobacco at least once.

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Ever since the 1960s it’s been understood that cigarettes are bad for your body. But American cigarettes may be worse than foreign brands. That is according to scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). HealthDay Reporter mentions that in a study, CDC researchers compared the main cancer-causing ingredient in cigarettes, nitrosamines, in the cigarette butts of American cigarettes and those from other countries. They found that not all cigarettes are the same in the amount of carcinogens they deliver to smokers. And that is an understatement.

The amount of nitrosamines in U.S. brands was about three times that of brands from Canada, the United Kingdom, or Australia, says Dr. Jim Pirkle with the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health. Tobacco-specific nitrosamines (TSNA) are known to vary among different brands of cigarettes but what’s of concern is that American smokers are exposed to even more of the drugs linked to cancer.

American blend tobacco has higher levels of TSNAs, while tobacco from other countries is called “bright” tobacco and is flue-cured, creating cigarettes with lower levels of TSNA, according to the CDC.

The bottom line is that all cigarettes are unsafe, regardless.

How will this information be used? Just in time for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to flex its new muscle and authority over dangerous tobacco products under the newly created Center for Tobacco Products.

Under the landmark law, signed by President Obama, the FDA plans to first address menthol cigarettes and smokeless tobacco, then any false promises the industry makes of one tobacco product as being safer than another. If the FDA decides that reducing the TSNA levels in cigarettes will benefit public health, we may see the agency address those standards in all tobacco products on the market.

The irony and danger here is that changing the TSNA levels will still not make cigarettes “safer” so critics say there is a danger in public perception in requiring cigarettes to have fewer carcinogens. Farah and Farah has years of experience in litigating cases against Big Tobacco and while this information is not surprising, it is further indication that the tobacco industry has no interest in protecting public health.

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A man from Fort Lauderdale is a former Florida smoker with lung cancer. He, like thousands of other Floridians, have filed lawsuits against Big Tobacco in Florida for hiding the dangers of smoking, and in fact, promoting smoking as something that was good for your health. Years later, when people were addicted and could not stop smoking, the dangers were revealed.

But has dropped his lawsuit against tobacco giant Philip Morris USA. Instead, he has accepted a $1,000 settlement against Big Tobacco. In his case, the fear of having to pay the legal fees of Philip Morris outweighed the risk of going to trial and losing. Two smokers recently had to pay the company $100,000 and $30,000.

When the Engle class action lawsuit against tobacco companies was decertified along with its $145 billion damage award, individuals were free to file their own cases. That meant that about 4,000 cases were filed in state court and about 4,000 in federal court. In the first case filed by the family of a man and a Florida jury awarded $8 million to his widow.

Based on the original Engle findings, the Florida Supreme court decided to reinstate a portion of the decision determined by the class. As a matter of fact these answers have been determined by Engle – that smoking causes certain diseases, that cigarettes are addictive, that cigarettes are defective and unreasonably dangerous, that tobacco companies conspired to conceal or omit information regarding the health effects of cigarette smoking or the addictive nature of smoking cigarettes and that they lied about cigarettes.

Philip Morris USA, a unit of Altria Group Inc. has vowed to fight the cases.

Source article: http://www.wtop.com/?sid=1818194&nid=111

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A 92-year-old man went up against Big Tobacco and he won.

Last Thursday, a Broward County, Florida jury decided to award him more than $5.3 million at the conclusion of a Florida tobacco lawsuit trial in which he claimed cigarettes caused his wife’s death in 1996. The man sued Philip Morris for causing his wife’s lung cancer. His wife was 73 when she died. In an earlier phase of the trial, the jury agreed that cigarettes killed her.

Many people fail to understand the attitude toward cigarettes when the deceased woman started smoking at the age of 16 in 1923. Doctors advised people to smoke to calm their nerves. The government gave cigarettes out to soldiers. Television commercials promoted cigarette smoking as cool and sophisticated. Howard Engle, a Miami Beach pediatrician, who led the class action lawsuit representing some 700,000 smokers, had been a tobacco-addict since the 1940s when cigarette companies gave medical students at the University of Wisconsin free cigarettes. He hated Big Tobacco and its strategies used to create lifetime users by creating addicts.

Howard Engle died this past July at the age of 89. He had suffered from smoking–related respiratory disease and lymphoma. His lawsuit yielded him a little over $13,000, but he was excited to eventually see 42,558 Floridians split $575 million that was distributed to those in the class.

The Engle lawsuit established for the first time that the industry lied and deceived the public about the dangers of cigarettes. So while people today are fully informed before they begin smoking, years ago people were coaxed into an addiction, which takes more than will-power to quit.

The woman in the above story smoked two packs of cigarettes a day before she died and she couldn’t quit. One night when watching the ‘Seven Dwarfs,” the seven tobacco executives, swear to Congress in 1994 that cigarettes were not linked to cancer, she told her husband, “If anything happens to me, sue them.” It was tough to believe back then that professional executives would lie to the public. But it was true. By that time, the industry knew cigarettes caused lung cancer.

Continue reading "Broward County Tobacco Win" »

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Big Tobacco has some close friends among the Florida legislature meeting in Tallahassee. According to an article from tampabay.com, Senate Bill 2198 caps the bond Big Tobacco would have to set aside in case they lose the cases filed by about 8,000 sick smokers. These are cigarette lawsuits filed by survivors of spouses who died from cigarettes, or by those injured permanently.

The bill will allow Big Tobacco a safe haven to appeal every judgment by posting bonds of no more than $100 million. A bond is required to be posted before an appeal can take place. And filing appeal after appeal can take time – all in Big Tobacco’s favor.

If a plaintiff dies, their survivor can take over a case, but if both die, the case goes away. Paving the way for endless appeals is a slap in the face to these people who have already waited decades to have their tobacco litigation day in court. Both a House and Senate committee have pushed through the bills.

This was very good news for Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco, and Lorillard, which will be allowed to use the system against the injured.

Chalk this up to a corporate bailout for an industry that has been established by the Florida Supreme Court. Deceiving the public and knowingly manufacturing a product they knew was highly addictive, knowingly manufacturing a product they knew caused more than a dozen horrible diseases; and who intentionally marketed this very dangerous product to the youngest of Americans.

Continue reading "Shielding Big Tobacco From Liability " »

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According to an online report, the first of thousands of Florida tobacco lawsuits to be filed against Philip Morris concluded Wednesday with a Fort Lauderdale jury awarding the widow of a smoker $8 million in damages.

It took the six jurors two days to return the favorable verdict to Elaine Hess.

Her husband, Stuart Hess, died in 1997 at the age of 55 of lung cancer after decades as a chain smoker. He was hopelessly addicted and unable to quit. Philip Morris said smoking was not addictive and Hess could have quit.

During the trial, jurors were shown video from the 1994 testimony of the “Seven Dwarfs” – the seven top executives of major tobacco companies who denied that smoking cigarettes was addictive.

This phase of the trial was to establish financial damages. $3 million was awarded in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages, sending a message to the Richmond, Virginia-based Philip Morris, a unit of Altria Group. The company announced it plans to appeal.

This case and the thousands of others, many represented by Farah and Farah, were forced to file individual cigarette lawsuits in Florida courts after a record $145 billion award in the Engle class-action was thrown out by the state Supreme Court in 2006.

While the outcome of this trial will not dictate what future individual juries could decide, Philip Morris has to be worried. It is already appealing a $79 million jury award in an Oregon case.

For years Big Tobacco enjoyed favorable rulings but this case at least agreed with the findings of the Engle class-action - that tobacco companies knew they were selling dangerous products and that they deceived the public by hiding those known risks.

Contact our Florida tobacco lawsuit attorneys at Farah and Farah today if you have any questions or feel you may have a potential claim. We’d be happy to talk to you about your case.

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